The Phantom Coach

by Michael Sims

  The atmosphere of the coach seemed, if possible, colder than that of the outer air, and was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell. I looked round at my fellow-passengers. They were all three men, and all silent. They did not seem to be asleep, but each leaned back in his corner of the vehicle, as if absorbed in his own reflections. I attempted to open a conversation.

  “How intensely cold it is tonight,” I said, addressing my opposite neighbour.

  He lifted his head, looked at me, but made no reply.

  “The winter,” I added, “seems to have begun in earnest.”

  Although the corner in which he sat was so dim that I could distinguish none of his features very clearly, I saw that his eyes were still turned full upon me. And yet he answered never a word.

  At any other time I should have felt, and perhaps expressed, some annoyance, but at the moment I felt too ill to do either. The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea. I shivered from head to foot, and, turning to my left-hand neighbour, asked if he had any objection to an open window?

  He neither spoke nor stirred.

  I repeated the question somewhat more loudly, but with the same result. Then I lost patience, and let the sash down. As I did so, the leather strap broke in my hand, and I observed that the glass was covered with a thick coat of mildew, the accumulation, apparently, of years. My attention being thus drawn to the condition of the coach, I examined it more narrowly, and saw by the uncertain light of the outer lamps that it was in the last stage of dilapidation. Every part of it was not only out of repair, but in a condition of decay. The sashes splintered at a touch. The leather fittings were crusted over with mould, and literally rotting from the woodwork. The floor was almost breaking away beneath my feet. The whole machine, in short, was foul with damp, and had evidently been dragged from some outhouse in which it had been mouldering away for years, to do another day or two of duty on the road.

  I turned to the third passenger, whom I had not yet addressed, and hazarded one more remark.

  “This coach,” I said, “is in a deplorable condition. The regular mail, I suppose, is under repair?”

  He moved his head slowly, and looked me in the face, without speaking a word. I shall never forget that look while I live. I turned cold at heart under it. I turn cold at heart even now when I recall it. His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural lustre. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between.

  The words that I was about to utter died upon my lips, and a strange horror—a dreadful horror—came upon me. My sight had by this time become used to the gloom of the coach, and I could see with tolerable distinctness. I turned to my opposite neighbour. He, too, was looking at me, with the same startling pallor in his face, and the same stony glitter in his eyes. I passed my hand across my brow. I turned to the passenger on the seat beside my own, and saw—oh Heaven! how shall I describe what I saw? I saw that he was no living man—that none of them were living men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent light—the light of putrefaction—played upon their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with the dews of the grave; upon their clothes, earth-stained and dropping to pieces; upon their hands, which were as the hands of corpses long buried. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned menacingly upon me!

  A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry for help and mercy, burst from my lips as I flung myself against the door, and strove in vain to open it.

  In that single instant, brief and vivid as a landscape beheld in the flash of summer lightning, I saw the moon shining down through a rift of stormy cloud—the ghastly sign-post rearing its warning finger by the wayside—the broken parapet—the plunging horses—the black gulf below. Then, the coach reeled like a ship at sea. Then, came a mighty crash—a sense of crushing pain—and then, darkness.

  It seemed as if years had gone by when I awoke one morning from a deep sleep, and found my wife watching by my bedside. I will pass over the scene that ensued, and give you, in half a dozen words, the tale she told me with tears of thanksgiving. I had fallen over a precipice, close against the junction of the old coach-road and the new, and had only been saved from certain death by lighting upon a deep snowdrift that had accumulated at the foot of the rock beneath. In this snowdrift I was discovered at daybreak, by a couple of shepherds, who carried me to the nearest shelter, and brought a surgeon to my aid. The surgeon found me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken arm and a compound fracture of the skull. The letters in my pocket-book showed my name and address; my wife was summoned to nurse me; and, thanks to youth and a fine constitution, I came out of danger at last. The place of my fall, I need scarcely say, was precisely that at which a frightful accident had happened to the north mail nine years before.

  I never told my wife the fearful events which I have just related to you. I told the surgeon who attended me; but he treated the whole adventure as a mere dream born of the fever in my brain. We discussed the question over and over again, until we found that we could discuss it with temper no longer, and then we dropped it. Others may form what conclusions they please—I know that twenty years ago I was the fourth inside passenger in that Phantom Coach.

  Charles Dickens

  1812–1870

  By the 1860s Charles Dickens was the most famous author on Earth. Behind him was a parade of novels, from chaotic early outings such as Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop to more tightly crafted works such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit. During this decade he wrote a series of sketches, collectively titled The Uncommercial Traveller, which appeared in his own weekly periodical, All the Year Round—the successor to Household Words, which he abandoned after a quarrel with its publisher. In one chapter, “Nurse Stories,” Dickens detailed, and no doubt embroidered upon, the ghoulish and macabre tales that his childhood nurse told him, apparently merely to frighten the poor lad.

  “Her name was Mercy,” wrote Dickens, “although she had none on me.” Apparently this semi-fictional character was based upon his real nurse, Mary Weller. In his first big success, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in the mid-1830s, Dickens bestowed her first name upon the nurse of the Nupkins family and her surname upon the Cockney valet who plays Sancho to Pickwick’s Quixote. Scholars also consider Weller the inspiration for David Copperfield’s doting nurse, Clara Peggotty.

  Dickens credited the nurse with sparking his interest in tales of crime and the supernatural. Mary was only thirteen years old when she came to work for the Dickens family—in 1817, when Charles was five—but apparently she arrived with a trunk full of horrific stories. Dickens particularly remembered the accounts of one of Mary’s characters, the ominously named Captain Murderer, who kills his wives and makes them into meat pies. “If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase),” wrote Dickens, “I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.”

  From his earliest days as a writer, Dickens was drawn to ghost stories. Always needing to fill out the month’s or week’s serial installment, he also sprinkled phantoms through his episodic early novels. In Pickwick you can find Gabriel Grubb, an ancestor of Ebenezer Scrooge who also gets his supernatural comeuppance on Christmas Eve; and Nicholas Nickleby includes a farcical ghost story called “Baron Koëldwethout’s Apparition.” In fact Dickens’s best-known work is a ghost story. The hugely influential Christmas Carol in Prose appeared in 1843, to be followed for the next few years by several Christmas volumes such as The Cricket on the Hearth and another supernatural story, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain. Ebenezer Scrooge strode out of his story and into the popular imagination alongside Don Quixote, later joined by Tom Sawyer, Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, and eventually characters such as Wonder Woman and
James Bond.

  While Dickens’s shorter ghost stories did not conjure characters as resonant and enduring as Scrooge, several are fascinating adventures into the supernatural—sometimes frightening, sometimes playful. They reach their pinnacle in the oft-reprinted train story “The Signal Man” and the even better (and less known) “Trial for Murder,” which is eerie, atmospheric, and genuinely suspenseful.

  Dickens may have collaborated on this story with his son-in-law, Charles Allston Collins, the younger brother of his friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins. Starting out as a religiously inclined Pre-Raphaelite painter, Collins gradually turned away from the visual arts and more toward writing. His most successful book was The Eye Witness, a collection of humorous essays that Dickens had originally published in his magazine. It appeared in 1860, the year that Collins married Dickens’s favorite daughter, Katey, who was also a painter. (She is remembered as Kate Perugini, her name after her second marriage, following Collins’s death in 1873.)

  In 1860 Dickens began assigning a distinct title and theme to each Christmas Extra issue, for which he sought stories from various contributors. The 1865 Christmas issue was entitled Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions and included stories by the Irish novelist Rosa Mulholland, the English children’s-book author Hesba Stretton (pseudonym of Sarah Smith), and others, with titles such as “To Be Taken Immediately” and “Not to Be Taken at Bed-Time.” The sixth of the doctor’s prescriptions, Dickens’s own, was titled “To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt,” but reprints of the story out of its original context soon acquired the title “The Trial for Murder.”

  Dickens’s influence on Victorian ghost stories was not limited to his own writing. As editor of two successful periodicals, he not only helped fan public interest in literary ghost stories but nurtured the career of many a young writer, including Amelia Edwards and Elizabeth Gaskell, both of whom you will find in this volume.

  The Trial for Murder

  I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect.

  In what I am going to relate I have no intention of setting up, opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of the Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be necessary to state as to this last that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree, however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head, might suggest an explanation of a part of my own case—but only a part—which would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience since.

  It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in England, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murderers as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I purposely abstain from giving any direct clue to the criminal’s individuality.

  When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicion fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. As no reference was at that time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered.

  Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence of the dead body from the bed.

  It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but in chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of Saint James’s Street. It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy chair at the moment, and the sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver which started the chair from its position. (But it is to be noted that the chair ran easily on castors.) I went to one of the windows (there are two in the room, and the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the moving objects down in Piccadilly. It was a bright autumn morning, and the street was sparkling and cheerful. The wind was high. As I looked out, it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust took, and whirled into a spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going from West to East. They were one behind the other. The foremost man often looked back over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a distance of some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised. First, the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so public a thoroughfare, attracted my attention; and next, the more remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded their way among the other passengers, with a smoothness hardly consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement, and no single creature that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them. In passing before my windows, they both stared up at me. I saw their two faces very distinctly, and I knew that I could recognize them anywhere. Not that I had consciously noticed anything very remarkable in either face, except that the man who went first had an unusually lowering appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him was of the colour of impure wax.

  I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole establishment. My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I wish that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they are popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn, when I stood in need of a change. I was not ill, but I was not well. My reader is to make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being “slightly dyspeptic.” I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his own from his written answer to my request for it.

  As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. But I knew that a verdict of Wilful Murder had been found against the suspected Murderer, and that he had been committed to Newgate for trial. I also knew that his trial had been postponed over one Sessions of the Central Criminal Court, on the ground of general prejudice and want of time for the preparation of the defence. I may further have known, but I believe I did not, when, or about when, the Sessions t
o which his trial stood postponed would come on.

  My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor. With the last, there is no communication but through the bedroom. True, there is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase; but a part of the fitting of my bath has been—and had then been for some years—fixed across it. At the same period, and as a part of the same arrangement, the door had been nailed up and canvassed over.

  I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions to my servant before he went to bed. My face was towards the only available door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was closed. My servant’s back was towards that door. While I was speaking to him I saw it open, and a man look in, who very earnestly and mysteriously beckoned to me. That man was the man who had gone second of the two along Piccadilly, and whose face was of the colour of impure wax.

  The figure, having beckoned, drew back and closed the door. With no longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened the dressing-room door, and looked in. I had a lighted candle already in my hand. I felt no inward expectation of seeing the figure in the dressing-room, and I did not see it there.

  Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and said: “Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied I saw a—” As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden start he trembled violently, and said, “O Lord yes sir! A dead man beckoning!”

  Now, I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of having seen any such figure, until I touched him. The change in him was so startling when I touched him, that I fully believe he derived his impression in some occult manner from me at that instant.